DVD Videos

Staged by Patrice Chéreau

The legendary production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, formerly released by Warner Music, again available on DVD.

A splendid opera under the musical direction of Daniel Barenboim and staged by his close friend Patrice Chérau.

When Alban Berg saw a performance of the existentialist drama Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, he said it left such a tremendous impression on him that he immediately made up his mind to set it to music.

Berg is recasting Büchner’s fragmentary drama in a nearly expressionistic way. His music tears into the flesh. Berg’s Wozzeck is not just an opera about social compassion, it is an opera in which fear finds consummate musical expression.

This extraordinary performance at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden was staged by Patrice Chéreau who can be called one of the greatest theatrical directors of this century.

Outstanding opera singers Franz Grundheber, Waltraud Meier, Graham Clark, Günter von Kannen and Mark Baker and many others complete this great opera performance.

Picture format DVD: NTSC 4:3

Sound format DVD: PCM Stereo

Region code: 0 (worldwide)

Subtitles: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish

Booklet notes: English, German, French

Running time: 97 min

Stage direction and set design: Dmitri Tcherniakov

In 2010, for the first time in its history, the Bolshoi Opera presented Alban Berg’s masterpiece 'Wozzeck'. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s truly historic production is now available in this DVD. The Russian director’s aim with this bold, sensitive transposition was “to highlight the hidden sorrows of a late 20th-century man dwelling in a megalopolis.” The redoubtably complex title role was entrusted to Austrian baritone Georg Nigl. Nigl studied with Kammersängerin Hilde Zadek. Over the last few years he has worked with, among others, Thomas Hengelbrock and his Baltasar Neumann Ensemble, Jordi Savall and his Hesperion XXI Ensemble, and Giovanni Antonini and Luca Pianca and their Il Giardino Armonico.

American soprano Mardi Byers plays Marie. A native of Colorado, she made her international debut as 'Tosca' in Lübeck and Elisabetta in 'Don Carlos' in Wiesbaden and Basel. She has also sung Donna Anna and Suor Angelica at the New York City Opera, as well as Elisabeth in 'Tannhäuser' and Ariadne. The Proms audience saw her in Mahler 8 in 2010 with Jiri Belohlavek.

Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis directs the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra and Chorus. Artistic director of the Perm Opera and founder and musical director of the Musica Aeterna ensemble, Currentzis is now to be seen in the world’s leading venues: the Opéra de Paris, Opernhaus Zurich, Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Teatro Real in Madrid.

Top cast with Pierre Boulez, Wiener Philharmoniker, Dorothea Röschmann and upcoming soprano Anna Prohaska.

After two works by Mahler’s pupil Alban Berg, featuring Röschmann and Prohaska, the main event of the concert is Gustav Mahler’s Das klagende Lied – a “great spectral opera for the mind’s eye” (Wiener Zeitung)

The Salzburg Festival is regarded by many as the world’s most renowned music festival.

Running Time Total: 95 minutes

Picture 16:9, HD

Sound DVD: DTS 5.0, PCM Stereo

Subtitles G, E, F, Sp, Kor., Chin.

Vera Nemirova, staging

Vera Nemirova’s challenging production of Berg’s operatic masterpiece Lulu won critical acclaim when first seen at the Salzburg Festival in 2010, and was successfully repeated in 2011, when the production was filmed for DVD.

Supporting Nemirova’s powerful vision of corruption, decadence and death were the highly praised set designs by the young German artist Daniel Richter.

Musically the production was led with style and assurance by the brilliant young German conductor Marc Albrecht, currently director of the Netherlands Opera. Singing Lulu with allure and passion was the lauded French soprano Patricia Petibon, whose charms gripped an outstanding cast of top European singers.

Lulu is a very rarely performed work, which was also left unfinished by the composer. This performance includes the missing 3rd act, which was completed by Friedrich Cerha, winner of the Salzburg Music Award 2010.

Picture format DVD: NTSC 16:9

Sound formats DVD: PCM Stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1

Region code: 2,3,4,5,6,8

Subtitles: English, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean

Booklet notes: English, German, French

Runnning time: 173 mins

Lulu is opera’s rawest exposition of the fatal risks of untamed erotic power. No man who meets Lulu does not want her − but, like the wind, she cannot be possessed. As happens to the heroine herself, the men who attempt to subdue her, and the one woman who also adores her, are destroyed by the flip side of the life force that pours through Lulu: death

Patricia Petibon is Lulu to the life. She sings Berg’s taxing music with easy, tonal beauty; the roles numerous acuti pose no problem. As The Weekend Australian observed: “Her top register, in particular, has a rich, luminous quality . . . that she exploits to great effect”

This live DVD of the Liceu’s 2010 hit production by Olivier Py also stars Franz Grundheber and Julia Juon. Michael Boder’s conducting brings out the sensuality and psychological disequilibrium of Berg’s 12-tone score.

The New York Times praised Petibon’s “earthy rawness”

Please note: This production contains nudity and sexual situations

Recorded live on 20th December 1980

Set by Rolf Glittenberg

When Lulu was premiered in Zurich in 1937, it immediately created a scandal. Even though the sexually explicit topic and the somewhat dubious characters of the drama barely cause a stir in the modern theatre world, stagings of the opera are still accompanied by divided opinion as to how to interpret the figure of Lulu and – since the advent of Friedrich Cerha’s completion – which version of the originally unfinished work to use. Arthaus presents a staging produced at the Zurich Opera, which offered an unusual and remarkable solution: it returned to the incomplete two-act version seen at the premiere. The finale consists of the Variations and the Adagio from the Lulu Suite, which conclude the work as a kind of coda. Musical Director Franz Welser-Möst felt that the unfinished state of the work was not merely due to the composer’s death in 1935, but also because Berg himself seems to have changed his concept of the opera. It seems that Berg’s final ideas, including the appearance of Lulu’s suitor as the reincarnation of her previous husbands in the third act and the equation of Dr. Schön with Jack the Ripper, fit Sven Eric Bechtolf‘s interpretation of the title figure extremely well. Opera performance and bonus film together provide the viewer of this DVD with an enlightened approach to one of the few post-tonal operas that enjoy ongoing success on stage.

BONUS: Lulu – The Lethal Victim. A Film by Reiner E. Moritz

Sound Format: PCM Stereo, DD 5.1, DTS 5.1

Picture Format: 16:9

DVD Format: DVD 9, NTSC

Subtitle Languages: DE, GB, FR, ES, IT

Running Time: 130 mins + 34 mins (bonus)

FSK: 12

Five years after first conducting the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra in their Venezuelan home, Claudio Abbado continues his commitment to this stunning ensemble in this first joint audiovisual concert recording.

Prokofiev’s extrovert Scythian Suite is a gift for the boundless energy of these young players, while the intricacy and anguish of Berg’s Lulu-Suite are an Abbado speciality, with soprano Anna Prohaska, in her Lucerne Festival debut, singing the heroine’s dazzling statement of self-justification.

The concert ends with an impassioned account of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, his final symphony, one of the most moving works in music history.

Picture Format DVD: NTSC 16:9

Sound Formats DVD: Dolby Digital 5.1., DTS 5.1, PCM Stereo,

Region Code: 0 (worldwide)

Booklet notes: Songtexts in German

Running Time: 111:45

Disc Format: DVD 9

FSK: 0

Berg’s masterful and thought-provoking opera tells the gripping story of the rise and fall of an alluring, destructive but vulnerable woman, culminating in her death at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Christof Loy’s austere, minimalist production allows the complexities of the drama to unfold through the sumptuous, taut beauty of the score. Agneta Eichenholz and Michael Volle lead an all-star cast under Antonio Pappano. Philip Langridge took the role of the Prince, in his last stage appearance before his sudden death earlier this year. Recorded in High Definition and true surround sound.

(Contains Scenes of Violence)

“It is immaculately rehearsed and executed – one doesn't often see opera acted with such freedom and honesty and absence of flummery. And its unsparing analytic clarity forces one to confront the bitter truth about Lulu's inner life and the corruption and idiocy of the men who are infatuated by her. … Antonio Pappano's electrifying conducting is razor-sharp in the manner of Pierre Boulez, and the orchestral playing is magnificent. … Singing with an extraordinary grace and insouciance, Eichenholz manages to make this monster chillingly real and hauntingly beautiful.” The Telegraph

Extra features:

Cast gallery

Interview with Antonio Pappano

Interview with Agneta Eichenholz

Running time 205 mins

Region code All regions

Picture format 16:9 Anamorphic

Sound format 2.0 LPCM & 5.1 DTS Digital

Menu language EN

Subtitles EN/FR/DE/ES

Recorded live from the Herkulessaal Munich, Sir Colin Davis conducts the Bayerischer Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, with soloist Gidon Kremer, in a performance of Alban Berg‘ s elegiac Violin Concerto. Alban Berg completed this concerto for violin and orchestra in 1935, impelled by the news of the death of Manon Gropius, the beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter of Mahler‘s widow by her second marriage, to the architect Walter Gropius. He dedicated it “to the memory of an angel”.

THE SECRET LIFE OF ALBAN BERG (DOCUMENTARY)

Alban Berg (1885-1935) lived in the mainstream of well-to-do Austrian society. His marriage to the beautiful Hélène was thought to be made in heaven. But how can this doyen of Viennese respectability be reconciled with the composer who wrote the dark operas Wozzeck and Lulu? In this multi-layered film, director Krišs Rusmanis explores the private world behind the composer’s public image and reveals the double life Berg led, despite his moving protestations of fidelity and devotion to his wife. While condemning the moral hypocrisy of society in Lulu, he concealed the existence of his illegitimate daughter, Albine, continued more than one clandestine love affair and frequented the sleazy haunts that flourished in Vienna. This multi-layered film explores Berg‘s double life. Soprano Kristine Ciesinki, who features in specially-staged extracts from Lulu and Wozzeck, travels to Vienna, Prague, the USA and Germany to track down important archive documents and people who can recall the composer‘s presence in their lives.